Reading Capital: Part II Continued (Hegel's Concept of Historical Time)

Marx often expresses his difference with the Political Economists in terms of history—they think a-historically and eternalize the categories of bourgeois economy. Thus, one might think that Marx is Ricardo + history. But this is a misunderstanding, and misses Marx’s real critique. In order to clarify the latter, Althusser asks: what concept of history is at work here?

As a counter-example to what we want, we take Hegel’s concept of historical time.
Hegel defines time as “the existing concept.” Thus, the concept is the essence of time. According to Althusser, “we have Hegel’s authority for thinking that historical time merely reflects the essence of the social totality of which it is the existence” (93). In other words, real existing social processes and relations are a sequential working out of their concept or essence.

“Two essential characteristics of Hegelian historical time can be isolated: its homogeneous continuity and its contemporaneity” (94).

1. Homogeneous continuity. A period in time expresses a stage of the dialectic. Time is a continuum in which the dialectic unfolds.
2. Contemporaneity. This is the condition of possibility of continuity. A period in time immediately expresses the social totality of which it is the existence. In other words, all the phenomena of a given historical period are part of a single expressive system. This structure allows what A. calls a coupe d’essence or an “essential section”: a cross section of any given present will express a determinate essence, without remainder. This means that the present is the absolute, unsurpassable horizon of all knowledge.

This notion of time is ideological, because it presupposes an immediacy between practice and the totality. But we can retain from it “the fact that the structure of the social whole must be strictly interrogated in order to find in it the secret of the conception of history in which the ‘development’ of this social whole is thought” (97). In other words, Hegel’s conception of historical time expresses bourgeois prejudices.